


Give Sorrow Words

by NightoftheWereHunty



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Banshee Lydia Martin, Gen, Grief/Mourning, One Shot, Scydia if you squint, everyone is sad and broken
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-29
Updated: 2015-09-29
Packaged: 2018-04-23 23:11:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4895917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightoftheWereHunty/pseuds/NightoftheWereHunty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This could technically be a one shot in the Coal Mining Love universe set right after Allison's funeral.</p><p> </p><p>    "Lydia, it’s time to go home,” he says softly.  </p><p>    She responds by turning away from him and gently stretches her hands back over the grave.  It’s painful to watch, and with a heavy sigh, the werewolf walks towards her.  If he has to be the bad guy, so be it.  </p><p> </p><p>                                           *************<br/>An exploration of Scott's grief and guilt immediately following Allison's death. Title is a quote from Macbeth:</p><p>“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Give Sorrow Words

    He’s not sure if his eyes are open or closed.  He sees the ceiling of his room, the fan slowly spinning as it winds to a stop, but the images remain unprocessed behind his eyelids like a dream.  He can’t tell if it’s already happened - the moment condemned to exist continuously in his memory.  Scott squeezes his hands and turns on his side.  He wants to forget.  Dear God, please let him forget.  The showers don’t wash off the smell.  He wonders if that’s because the scent isn’t real.  Maybe it exists in his mind, like the Tell Tale Heart.  He carries it with him everywhere.  Bitter, coppery, and slick.  The only thing worse than the smell is the small gasp she made before her mouth went slack.  Don’t think about it.  Please don’t think about it.    
  
    Scott finds her at the cemetery wearing the same clothes she wore to the funeral earlier that day.  A part of him is irritated that Lydia beat him to the grave.  He wants to be alone, and he almost turns around to walk away, but then he notices how fragile and small the banshee looks.  She’s always been delicate, but the way moonlight hugs her back makes him think she might shrink and wither away before he can reach her.  He smells her tears, dried and caked on her cheeks, smudged into her make up, and on her arms from where she’d consistently wiped the salty water.  She shakes and shivers as she moves her hands over the dirt, but it’s not until she actually starts digging that he feels the need to speak to her.  She stills her frenzied movements and pulls her hands into her lap at his voice.  She turns her head to stare through her hair at the approaching Alpha.  He falters in his step when he sees her look - an impassive, absent stare that rejects even the moon’s reflection.  
  
    “Lydia, it’s time to go home,” he says softly.    
  
    She responds by turning away from him and gently stretches her hands back over the grave.  It’s painful to watch, and with a heavy sigh, the werewolf walks towards her.  If he has to be the bad guy, so be it.    
  
    “Get up,” he says as he pulls her to her feet.  She stumbles out of his grasp and turns to the werewolf as if finally noticing him.  She looks at the grave, down at her clothes, and then back at Scott before she runs her dirty hands through her hair.  
  
    “I can hear her,” she whispers from behind her hands.  “How did this happen?  How could we let this happen to her?”  
  
    “Don’t,” he says firmly.  He can’t listen to her mad ramblings.  Not now.  
  
    “You heard her too,” the banshee continues in a lost voice.  “That’s why you’re here.  She called you.”  
  
    “Lydia, please stop,” he says as he puts a hand to his eyes and rubs.  
  
    “You heard her,” she repeats,  “I know you heard her. . .”  Her voice drifts as she fixes hollow eyes on the boy in front of her.  “What did she say to you?”  
  
             _I love you_  
  
    “I’ll call Stiles,”  he says, trying to ignore her words and the memory.  “He’ll pick you up.”  
  
    “No!” she says quickly as she shrinks away from Scott.  “No, no, not him.  Why would you even say that name?  Why are you even here?  Go away, shoo, shoo!”  She waves her hands at him the way one would wave off a stray dog.  When he takes a step back, her movements become less stilted and she seems to relax back into herself.  “I know, I know,” she continues,  “We can’t blame him, can we?  We all had a part to play.”    
  
    Scott looks up sharply from his phone, but he can’t bring himself to correct her.  Instead, he turns to face the tree-line and dials Stiles’s number.  He waits for the tenth ring before he hangs up with a sigh.  
  
    “He didn’t answer, did he?” she says softly.  “Of course he didn’t. . . Why would he?”  
  
    “I walked here, so I can’t give you a ride home,”  Scott says as he feels what little energy he had flee his body.  He sits on the damp ground and leans his head back, every now and then catching a mixture of fresh dirt, grass, and then, underneath them both, chemicals.  The sterile and preserved smell, so different from the soft and sweet lilac of Allison, had bothered him as much, if not more than, the stench of her blood.  At least that had smelled like her and not an abomination of chemical reek.  He’d tried searching through the scents, desperate to find a note of Allison’s, but there’d been nothing to find though.  Every last trace of Allison’s scent had been erased by the pungent residue of the embalming process.  He breathes out through his nose and in through his mouth, hoping to dull the scent.  
  
    “I have my car,” Lydia says,  “I drove to the funeral.”  
  
    He looks up at her and notices with relief that the madness seems to have left her eyes.  She smoothes down her hair with a nervous movement and licks her lips.  He can tell from her heart beat that she’s still on edge, but at least the previous overwhelming scent of her panic has changed into only slight distress.  Lydia puts her hands in her coat pocket and sits beside Scott.  
  
    “Do you want to be alone?” she asks.  
  
    “I did,” he answers truthfully, “But now I’m not so sure.”  
  
    “I wanted to be alone until you showed up,”  she says while using the cloth of her pocket to rub dirt off her shoes.  “I can leave if you want.”  
  
    Scott knows from her scent that the offer is genuine, but when he looks at her, he loses the will to accept.  Haunted doesn’t capture the image.  Her skin is cracked from the cold, make up dries in streaks down her face, and the grief she wears as a death shroud stills her body to such a degree that she’d pass for dead if Scott couldn’t hear the hammering of her heart.      
      
    “You don’t need to leave,” he says.  
      
    The wind picks up and pulls Lydia’s hair loose from behind her ear.  Strawberry blond strands sway into Scott’s face and he breathes in the banshee’s scent, eager to smell anything other than the chemicals beneath the earth.  Her scent is similar to Allison’s, which isn’t shocking considering the amount of time the two girls spent together.  Pheromones are strange like that.   He used to enjoy picking out the subtle differences between the two.  Allison’s scent was less earthy than Lydia’s, and although both girls had a hint of nectar and lilac to them, the banshees notes were heavier as if the petals had been fermented in honey first.  Still, if he closes his eyes and breathes deep enough, the lighter palette of fresh nectar emerges from Lydia’s scent and coats the back of his mouth.  
  
    “Do I smell like her?”  
  
    The werewolf opens his eyes and meets Lydia’s stare.  So she’d known what he was doing.    
  
    “If I do smell like her, I’m envious,” she continues, “The closest I can get is a sweater, and even then, with my nose, the familiar scent will be gone in a day or two.”  
  
    “Yours will eventually change too,” he says.  “That’s how scent works.”  
  
    “Still,” she says, “It takes longer for a memory to leave a person.  Especially the memory of a scent.”  
  
    Scott watches Lydia from the corner of his eye.  She stares trance-like straight ahead before she seems to realize he’s watching her.  When she turns to face him, he’s forced to wonder how much she knows of the uncharted wildness that peeks through her eyes.  How much can banshees really see?  
  
    “Focus on her scent as you last smelled it, and it will never leave you,” she says quietly.  “You’ll become a Shakespearean tragedy.”  Scott gives her a confused look, and Lydia continues with a sigh while mockingly rubbing her hands together, “Out damned spot, out.”  
  
    “But Lady MacBeth was a murderer,” he says.  
  
    “True,” she agrees, “But the guilt is what drove her mad.”  Lydia stops and looks down at her hands.  “Don’t you feel guilty?” she says the words so quietly that Scott barely hears her despite his increased senses.  “I feel guilty. . . If I’d fought back sooner, tried to get away, then maybe I could’ve warned her.  At least, you would’ve known not to leave her.”  
  
    Scott flinches with her last sentence.  He doesn’t like thinking about that.  How he left her.  How he found her.  How she left him.  
  
             _I love you_  
  
    “It’s late,” he says,  “And you’ve been here since four.  We should go home.”  
  
    “I’ll give you a ride,” she nods in agreement.  
  
    They walk in silence back to her car with Scott extending a hand every couple of minutes to steady Lydia as she stumbles through the grass in her heels.  He gets into the passenger seat and lets his head drop in exhaustion as she starts the car.  Gravel groans from under the tires as Lydia steers them away from the cemetery.  He wants to look back, but he can’t.  He imagines if he does, he’d see her.  Standing barefoot in the grass, confused as to why they’re leaving without her.  Scott moves a hand and covers his eyes to resist the temptation.  He leans deeper into his seat and takes a shaky breath.  The taste happens before the smell.  He tries breathing through his mouth, but the scent has already burrowed into him.  Clings to him.  Bitter, coppery, and slick.  He knows it’s not real, but it was once.  And that memory won’t die.  It beats in his mind like the Tell Tale Heart, and he’ll carry it with him everywhere.  


**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to incorporate themes of guilt from Macbeth and the Tell Tale Heart. I also wanted to touch on the idea of memories existing outside of time so that there's a part of Scott forever watching Allison die. Smell is the strongest sense we have tied to memory, it's that memory, existing outside of time, that keeps reminding him of the smell of Allison's death. And once he focuses on the scent and memory of her death, it stains him the same as if he'd killed her himself.
> 
> Long story short, talk about your feelings, guys.


End file.
